Lecture Circuit

Saturday, Oct. 24, celebrities, screenwriters, actors, and writers mounted the first-ever Hollywood Disabilities Forum--an event for entertainment industry professionals to "explore opportunities and challenges of people with disabilities in entertainment." Comedy writers (and actors) Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant contributed that mildly controversial video to support the cause.

The all-day event was held at UCLA's Melnitz Hall. GalleyCat caught up with Allen Rucker--the Writers with Disabilities chair for the Writers Guild of America, West and a critically-acclaimed author--to find out more about the event.

He explained: "The event was packed. Two morning workshops for aspiring actors and writers with disabilities had to turn people away. The afternoon keynote by 'Something About Mary' director Peter Farrelly was an hysterical primer on how things get done in Hollywood. After that, the panel of Farrelly, David Milch ("Deadwood" creator), Vince Gilligan ("Breaking Bad" creator), Daryl Mitchell (star of the new Fox series, "Brothers,"--the first sitcom ever to star in a man using a wheelchair), and others."

Rucker concluded by laying out the day's most controversial writing topic: "They discussed the creative inclusion of characters with disabilities into their work and argued, sometimes vehemently, over the issue of whether only actors with disabilities have the right to play characters with disabilities."

Frankly, we wish all public readings by authors started with this warning, or one rather like it.

That's Jim Dale, who you may recognize as the narrator of the seven Harry Potter audiobooks—last Tuesday morning, he came to the Children's Center of the New York Public Library to read scenes from Return to the Hundred Acre Wood, an authorized sequel to the original Winnie-the-Pooh stories by A.A. Milne written by David Benedictus with illustrations by Mark Burgess in the style of Ernest K. Shepard.

In addition to a book launch (which brought several executives from Penguin Young Readers Group, the event was also an unveiling of a new set of murals depicting the characters, decorating an alcove in which the original stuffed animals owned by Christopher Robin Milne are kept in glass cases.

We've got a lot more video from the event, by the way—Dale reads from two excerpts of the new book, and answers a question about finding the new voice of Pooh.

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"As a self-proclaimed media junkie, I find what's going on in the media terribly interesting. I liken it to the introduction of mass market paperbacks. At the time, everyone said it was going to mean the end of hardcovers. Hardly. I've been in publishing for 30 years, and ever since I walked in the door of my first job at Lippincott and Crowell, I've heard rumors of the death of publishing lurking in every corner. And here we are. Hardcovers didn't die—everything just shifted around, market shares changed, and there was room for everyone.

"I think and hope that the same will be true of content delivery on the internet. Sure, the print and broadcast outlets that I'm used to working with are suffering. But I don't think they're going away. It's all just going to shift—and keep shifting."

Thanks to Novelists, Inc. for sending us an excerpt from the speech independent literary publicist Scott Manning gave at its 20th anniversary conference last weekend in St. Louis, Missouri. And for the photo!

GalleyCat's former book party field correspondent, Amanda ReCupido, now has her own excellent blog, The Undomestic Goddess, where she talks about feminism and pop culture—including some literary events. Earlier this week, she went to a lecture by Barbara J. Berg (left) related to her new book, Sexism in America: Alive, Well, and Ruining Our Future. "Berg traces the assault on women's status from the 1950s—when Newsweek declared 'for the American girl, books and babies don't mix'—to the present, exploring the deception about women's progress and contextualizing our current situation," ReCupido reports; although there's been some setbacks in the last decade or so, Berg says young women are ready to fight to regain that lost ground and make sure they don't lost it again. "There is much work still left to be done," ReCupido summarizes, "and we have the tools and the drive to do it, so let's get to it!"

Last week, we had the privilege of sitting in on a workshop conducted by entrepreneur-authors Pam Slim and Jonathan Fields on how to identify your vocational passion and create a business around it. In the morning session, one of the points Slim hit upon was the importance of pacing—don't spend hours trying to figure out how to market yourself, she warned, if you aren't sure what you're doing yet. The advice, she told us during a break, was rooted in her own experience creating a book from her blog, Escape from Cubicle Nation; after listening to her weave ideas about platform and outreach and all that, she recalled laughingly, her publisher stopped her and suggested, "Just write the goddamn book." It was the best advice she could have gotten, she says: "When you're thinking too much and getting ahead of yourself in terms of how you're going to sell it, you lose that intent focus on what the story actually is."

Later that day, we got a chance to talk to Fields about what motivated him to start writing about his experiences ditching a job in corporate law to open his own fitness center and then a yoga studio, as outlined in Career Renegade... and he confessed that the original book concept that he'd sold his publisher actually left out most of his own story, focusing near exclusively on the career paths of other entrepreneurs...

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Scores of publishing types are vying for a coveted spot at the SXSW Festival next year, proposing more than twenty panel discussions about the future of publishing. Online readers can vote on their favorite panels, helping determine the line-up at the festival next March.

Last year's publishing panel sparked fireworks among literary bloggers. Over at BookSquare, Kassia Krozser has created an excellent list of all the voting options for 2010. Here's a sampling of the entries, but be sure to vote on the complete list. Simply follow the individual links to vote.

-Beyond Publishing: When Every Book is Connected to Everyone: Stephanie Troeth, Book Oven (Hugh McGuire, Peter Brantley, Andrew Savikas, Kassia Krozser)
-A Brave New Future for Book Publishing : Kevin Smokler, CEO BookTour.com
-Romancing the e-Book: Publishing's e-Volutionary Revolution: Deidre Knight, Knight Agency (includes GalleyCat senior editor Ron Hogan)
-The Novel in 2050: Richard Nash, Red Lemonade
-Book Publishing – The New Ecosystem: Maya Bisineer, Memetales
-Authors, Publishers and Social Media: Hug it Out: Tim O'Shaughnessy, LivingSocial
-Why Keep Blogging? Real Answers for Smart Tweeple: Emily Gordon, Emdashes.com founder, includes GalleyCat senior editor Ron Hogan.

Last week, we went to Housing Works Used Bookstore & Café to watch the New York City launch of Love Is a Four-Letter Word, an anthology edited for Plume by Algonquin Books publicity director Michael Taeckens. Wendy McClure, Maud Newton, and Amanda Stern each read excerpts from their essays about doomed relationships from their past—how they didn't see the warning signs and, then, how they did—land were joined by Said Sayrafiezadeh and master of ceremonies Dan Kennedy.

Several other contributors to the anthology came out to cheer their colleagues on, including Jami Attenberg and D. E. Rasso, who will be reading from their essays tonight at The Half King alongside Emily Flake and Michelle Green. (Later in the week, Attenberg and Green will meet up with Sayrafiezadeh at WORD, an independent bookstore in Greenpoint.) We also spotted Jennifer Finney Boylan, who read at another Love event the following night with Josh Kilmer-Purcell, and told us all about the young adult series she'll be launching next summer about a young boy who is really a monster (though of what nature we are unsure) and is being sent to an academy where he will learn to pass for human. Now, we're already on record as huge Boylan fans, but this sounds really intriguing, so we're looking forward to this!

Earlier this year, when the Pogues played Washington, D.C., bestselling novelist and writer/producer on The Wire George Pelecanos was in the audience, and he went backstage after the show: "The band were fans of The Wire (we had used several of their songs, memorably, on the show)," he recalls, "and we were all fans of their music going back to the 80s, when I was buying their vinyl imports at records stores like Phantasmagoria in Wheaton, Maryland." A few weeks later, when band member Spider Stacey came through town, they met again:

" Over a meal in Chinatown, on H Street, (Full Kee, my spot for Chinese) I told Spider that I would like to do a pub event in London when I came over in July, and asked him if he would be interested in playing a set after I did a reading. He agreed and through Gaby Young hooked it up at Boogaloo on Archway Road in Highgate, run by a fellow named Richard who used to book the old Filthy McNasty's. The gig was set for Thursday, July 23. To my surprise, it wasn't just Spider and a couple of friends on the bill, as I had understood it would be. It was The Pogues, who had come to play their first pub date since 1983. In other words, it was history."

The video pretty much speaks for itself (note: George Pelecanos does not write about nice people having a nice time, so consider your officemates), but there are more highlights from the show online. We haven't had a chance to sift through all the footage yet to see if it includes the Pogues' version of "Down in the Hole," but we're certainly having fun looking.

Miriam Berkley sent us a photograph from a reading poet Richard Wilbur gave earlier this week at the 20th annual Sewanee Writers Conference. She reports that his selected presentations from The Disappearing Alphabet "had the audience in stitches." Earlier that day, William Logan, Wyatt Prunty, Mary Jo Salter, and Brad Leithauser paid tribute to the 88-year-old Wilbur with essays on his long career in poetry and translation.

>Last week, the Center for Publishing at the NYU School of Continuing & Professional Studies invited a number of book bloggers and others connected to the digital side of publishing to speak to the students in their summer publishing program, and we were honored to be among the participants. The panel of seven (plus moderator Sara Nelson) covered a wide variety of topics during the two-hour seminar, from the role of publishing companies in the future "eco-system" of books to the shifting power dynamics between readers, writers, and reviewers—a conversation spurred by Alice Hoffman's online attack on her reviewer (we hadn't yet heard of Alain de Botton's equally puerile behavior, or we would've brought that up, too). It isn't just that authors can strike back when they get panned by critics, we observed—readers are more than willing to go online to argue against negative reviews of books they love, or to create new outlets to discuss the books that the mainstream media wouldn't even condescend to review. (The lines of communication between readers and writers have also intensified, and not always smoothly; see Anne Rice's rebuttal to disgruntled fans a few years back, for example.)

Front row: GalleyCat senior editor Ron Hogan and Jessica Stockton Bagnulo (The Written Nerd). Middle row: Sarah Burningham of HarperStudio, Richard Eoin Nash, and Sarah Wendell & Candy Tan (Smart Bitches, Trashy Books). Back row: Sara Nelson, Sarah Weinman.